Design by Jean Pierre Consuegra
Artists like Central Cee, YT, Len, fakemink, Jim Legxacy, Llondon actress, and afrosurrealist are imbuing the Union Jack with new meaning through their visuals and music.
February 11, 2026
BY Emma Madden
“We’re proud to be from here, and proud to be making this kind of music.”— Sabih Mahmood
Llondon Actress loves Britain. He loves Amy Winehouse. He loves Loski. He loves J Hus. He loves the TFL and Strawberry Mirinda and chicken shops and grey skies. But he struggles to reconcile that love with his hatred of the British Empire and its government.
“I will probably always feel this tension because of where Britain sits in world politics,” he says, “but I know the individuality that being British gives to art will always remain. I will never stop loving that.” That tension is felt on his standout song, “country,” when he raps: “I think I would die if I had to leave this country.” He was thinking back to his childhood—the British influences that had naturally rubbed off on him—and feeling a deep national pride, grateful to have been “born into such a musically elite country.” As a British Indian, he says he was “keen to express a sense of homegrown pride, because I wasn’t hearing that from anyone other than racists. I don’t want to let the alt-right own the flag or loving Britain.”
So he placed the Union Jack on his artwork, flying the flag for a growing cohort of Black, brown, and diasporic British rappers placing it in their visuals. For all of these artists, the same tension holds: loving where they’re from while remaining critical of the empire that shaped it. “The flag is a symbol of the biggest empire in history,” Llondon Actress says. “There are so many countries that see the Union Jack and think of nothing but how Britain stripped their resources, land, and people.”
Since at least 2024, the Union Jack has become a rite of passage for much of the UK underground—from YT to Len—and has even reached the upper tiers of the mainstream, with Central Cee donning a Union Jack skully on 2025’s Can’t Rush Greatness album cover and pinkpantheress dressing in a tartan take on the flag across her music videos and promo pics. Together, they are unrolling Cool Britannia 2.0: squaring their full-throated love of the country they come from and the art it produces—at a moment when British rap in particular is reaching new global prominence—with their distaste for the history that shaped it. They are expanding the meaning of patriotism, broadening it beyond its assumed whiteness. Many are first-generation immigrants, setting the terms of their own identity and representation as Brits in real time.
South London-based rapper afrosurrealist placed the Union Jack on the cover of his 2025 album BUYBRITISH as a way of navigating what he calls the unfinished nature of Black British identity. “Black British identity, as it exists now, is still relatively new and still being defined,” he says. “I can’t claim my homeland when all my lived experience is here, but I also can’t fully inherit a version of Britishness that wasn’t built with me in mind. So I kind of exist in that in-between space.” Using the flag, afrosurrealist seeks to bridge that gap, claiming a sense of Britishness for himself and for others like him.
For decades, the Union Jack has been freighted with exclusion, whether weaponized by far-right movements, entangled in racial unrest, or critiqued most famously by Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. As recently as 2025, the flag was ubiquitous at mass far-right demonstrations framed around anti-immigration and white nationalist sentiment.
A new wave of UK rappers, whether consciously or not, are transforming the Union Jack into a national and cultural rebrand, one rooted in soft power and the persuasive force of “cool.” For Llondon Actress, cool is inseparable from Britishness itself. “I chose my name because I wanted people to know the music was British before anything else,” he says. “It shapes every artistic choice I make, because it reflects who I am and where I come from.”
Meanwhile, designers like Mowalola have worked alongside rising rap figures such as fakemink and Ceechynaa to make the Union Jack cool again. At fashion shows, Jordanluca has sent Union Jack kilts and bombers down the runway, and Union Jack manicures have been spreading across the ‘Gram.
“I can’t claim my homeland when all my lived experience is here, but I also can’t fully inherit a version of Britishness that wasn’t built with me in mind. So I kind of exist in that in-between space.”— afrosurrealist
The last time Britain witnessed such a vigorous and visible embrace of the Union Jack was three decades ago, during the 1990s’ Cool Britannia moment. London was once again declared “swinging,” or, as Vanity Fair put it, “the nerve center of pop’s most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991.” Britpop turned the clock back to the 1960s, staging a return to a supposedly simpler, prelapsarian Britain; one in which race, class, and empire could be smoothed over through nostalgia.
That vision was always selective. Across 1990s Britain, Blackness drove the dancefloor: from reggae and dub to jazz, jungle, and hip-hop, or the wintry futurism of techno. These sounds offered alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia’s guitar-driven fantasy, but they were largely excluded from mainstream narratives.
Yet Black British cultural assertion was not new; it had been unfolding for decades. The term “Black British” began to take shape during the 1950s and 1960s, as Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants (also known as the Windrush Generation) built communities and distinctive cultural expressions in response to systemic racism and the need to claim their place in British society.
That lineage runs through today’s scenes: from Jim Legxacy’s black british music (2025) to afrosurrealist’s BUYBRITISH. “We’ve been making asses shake since the Windrush,” a voice declares on Jim Legxacy’s album.
What makes this moment striking is how wholehearted, sentimental, and earnest this embrace of Britishness is. As Dean Blunt has long understood, Black and immigrant artists’ sincerity is often misread as irony. And there’s something racialized about that misunderstanding. Loving Britain, openly and emotionally, has not historically been afforded to Black people without suspicion.
Dean Blunt’s use of the Union Jack became an influential visual gesture for many artists and listeners. On Babyfather’s 2016 album BFF, a Union Jack–emblazoned hoverboard drifts across the London skyline on the cover, and the album opens with a line from Craig David’s 2000 MOBO Awards acceptance speech: “This makes me proud to be British,” delivered while wearing a jacket reading “BUY BRITISH.”
afrosurrealist would later adopt those words as his own album title, transforming them from a literal exhortation to shop domestically into a declaration of pride in the value of British music itself. In a scene that’s competing with cities receiving much more investment, like New York and Los Angeles, the UK underground has to loudly advocate for itself. “UK rap is in the best position it’s ever been,” afrosurrealist attests.
Sabih Mahmood, the 3D/SFX designer behind visuals for Jim Legxacy and PinkPantheress, has deliberately incorporated the Union Jack into their work, bringing the flag into the imagery of artists whose influence now spans the globe. Mahmood first used a Union Jack in the music video for Jim Legxacy’s “Father.” While filling out the Frutiger Aero-like 3D rendering of Legacy’s imagined childhood bedroom, he noticed a little bit of space on the ceiling next to the Dizzee Rascal and Halo posters, and thought to himself: “You know what? I’m going to put the flag there with a lot of intention.” Mahmood knew the video would do numbers and spread fast. “And I wanted everyone to know he was from the UK.”
For years, Mahmood notes, many of his American peers dismissed UK rap as something of a novelty, “a bit unlistenable,” he says, aside from a handful of crossover moments, like Dean Blunt and Skepta’s collaborations with A$AP Rocky. But that perception is now being turned on its head. The goal, he explains, is twofold: to show younger British artists that success is possible without mimicry, and to demonstrate to the rest of the world that the UK is producing some of the best music anywhere. “We’re proud to be from here, and proud to be making this kind of music.”
The early visual language of what would become today’s UK underground—whether it was YT’s Union Jack shutter shades on the covers of his early SoundCloud loosies or Len’s flipped Union Jack—helped usher in a kind of Cool Britannia 2.0. The effect has been so widespread that newer, smaller rappers now treat the flag as a rite of passage in their visuals. “It’s become a bit of a trend,” Mahmood agrees.
What these artists are building today is not a rigid version of what Black, diasporic Britishness should sound like, but a more accurate representation of its global influences and coalitions. Legxacy’s music, for instance, is cosmopolitan in scope, unmoored from any single regional sound, and doesn’t neatly map onto a fixed idea of what “British” music is supposed to be. There’s no overt accent performance, no obligatory trap or grime signifiers. Instead, he belongs to a generation of artists moving beyond those limiting factors while embracing Britishness in a more expansive sense. “You don’t have to be a trap rapper in order to make it in the industry,” says Mahmood.
Central Cee - 'Can't Rush Greatness'
afrosurrealist - 'BUYBRITISH'
YT - "Prada or Celine"
Llondon Actress - "country"
Len - 'MAKE BRITAIN S3XY AGAIN'
Jim Legxacy - 'Black British Music'
Babyfather - '"BBF" Hosted by DJ Escrow'
It’s why their visuals are re-entrenching Britishness, a deliberate attempt to stage a very specific kind of British coming-of-age: cheap drinks with “not to be sold separately” written on their rim, dodgy grime MP3s ripped from Limewire, early MySpace aesthetics, Cara DeLevigne throwing up a middle finger in front of the Union Jack; Feng’s deep commitment to the 2k11 Kelvin filter.
This is all reason for these artists and their fans to feel patriotic. In the UK underground especially, coolness is indexing itself, and spreading further afield. Kids in the States are building playlists of UK underground rap, tunneling further down the iceberg, curating edits of Rico Ace and fakemink overlaid with Giphy Union Jacks, and aligning themselves, aesthetically and culturally, with what now reads as the center of cool.
afrosurrealist says now is the turning point, the moment people will look back on in ten years, “when Ceebo’s sold out a residency at the O2, N4T’s on a world tour, and Gabriella Cole’s headlining Coachella.” That future, he suggests, will cement a new strain of Black and diasporic Britishness: one unburdened by historical trauma and shaped instead by the joy of growing up inside the British music scene.
As afrosurrealist puts it: “I don’t think I have to consider the mythology of the British Empire to love the experience of getting chicken and chips after school.”